The adopted son of former US President Ronald Reagan has taken to Fox News to remind American conservatives that when they use free email services they are helping the liberals win.
In an editorial published on the right-leaning news website on Wednesday, Michael Reagan, a radio host and Republican strategist, reminds Americans …

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Like father like son

Re: Like father like son

So Raygun snr, initially pro abortion, protected medicare, increased national debt, passed tax rises 7 out of 8 years in office, remind me which party he stood for :-) On balance he did also slash taxes on the wealthy and widen the 'poverty gap', and did eventually cut som social spending.

I actually don't dislike him, he seemed to have the courage to do what needed doing (although not all the time). I find it amusing his son is playing off the family name when his dad was basically wearing a republican hat and liberal shoes. His poppa was one of the more center right presidents.

Cheers

Re: Cheers

Re: Cheers

You know why I never got a reagan.com email address? First off, it detracts from whatever I say. People discount whatever you say based upon social cues like email domains and such, much like we automatically think the hipster in the coffee shop bragging over his bluetooth about his sexual escapades is a douchebag (and a liar -- the army has good reason to call those glasses hipsters wear "VD-prevention eyewear").

Google is entitled to free speech in the form of political donations, but apparently, Republicans are not socially entitled to such a liberty. Possessing a conservative bumper sticker is a good way to get your car keyed. Usually, you'll hear some self-righteous juvenile bullshit about sticking it to the man or whatever. Case in point: you think it's intelligent to block the domain. Sadly, you'll get shown a good deal more respect for exercising your right to free speech than I will get for exercising mine in pointing out this hypocrisy. I suppose your next trick will be trotting out the usual the lame-assed excuses and ad hominem justifications afterwards.

You could, of course, grow up, and realize that anybody sporting this domain has handily singled themselves out as a ripe target for your abuse, but I suppose that's too much for you to comprehend.

Re: Cheers

Left and Right are not particularly useful definitions since the US two party-system has polarized all sorts of thing as belonging to Left or Right on an entierly arbitrary basis. Anti-abortion apparently that's lumped in with believing in low taxes for some reason? Compulsory medical insurance? Left wing thing apparently (despite forcing people to pay for private health care via insurance seeming pretty non-socialist to me). They just become two camps that grow increasingly logically inconsistent.

But what's really interesting with "Left" and "Right" is how little they match up to many people's perceptions. Biggest political donations in the Obama vs. John McCain presidential fight? Goldman Sachs donated 75% to Obama and 25% of their donations to McCain. Microsoft donated 70% of their contributions to the Democrats. Time-Warner: another big Dem. backer. Ask most Left wing people and they'll insist that the Right is the corrupt big business end of the scale, better funded, and that the Left are the underdogs. But Obama got and spent around double what his rival did in the presidential campaign. I'm not ranting about the Left here, political contributions need reigning in massively all around. But the image most people have of the "Left" is seriously at odds with the reality.

I even saw someone on these forums rant about fascists as a right-wing idealogy. Uh, Mussolini - pretty much responsible for the modern term, was a socialist. The NAZIs were the National Socialism party and when they gained power, economically turned into a kind of state managed industrialism (hardly capitalist). But somehow some people want to cast these things as tendencies of "The Right".

The Tea Party - considered very Right-wing - were pretty much all against foreign wars whilst the Democrats were voting to fund them. Reality vs. Popular Depiction clashing once again.

They're not useful terms. They were back in the days of Pitt the Younger, but modern American politics has turned them as much into camps of allegiance, as based on consistent ideology. And hypocrisy is rampant.

Re: Cheers

Re: Cheers

So... er... Google sells ads that promote products, I thought that was in keeping with free-market capitalism. Anyway, how does one know the political leanings of people working for any given company? That can be no way of choosing products and services.

Re: America...

There i some truth in that, its closer to a center right and far right. There is no mainstream left wing parties.

Politics as a whole has become corrupted by donations, lies, lobbying and vested interests. Just look at the people we put forward, can republicans honestly say Palin was a good candidate? She accused Obama of being a drug smoking dog eater. Really, thats the person you want to show the world? Republicans have some great ideas and some piss poor ones, just like the democrats do.

Re getting your car keyed over a bumper sticker, thats frankly pathetic. If you don't agree with a persons political ideas, assuming they aren't a tin pot dictator, then vandalism has no place. Not all people, republican or democrat, are as loony as the folks we see on TV. And for gods sake put Fox news on the comedy channel where it. belongs.

A lot could be solved by compulsory voting and a none of the above box.

Re: Cheers

Liberals!

I just always find it amusing when conservative Americans use the word "liberal" as if it's a dirty word that suggests being one of Satan's evil hordes, while the in the UK it's more associated with wishy-washy, middle of the road ineffectiveness.

Re: Cheers

Actually, Left and Right came - not from the British Parliament - but from the seating of the National Assembly in the First French Republic (1789 until Napoleon declared himself Emperor.) They really don't have application outside of a small period of French history. But it's easy for people to be lazy.

Re: Liberals!

Even though conservatives over here in America think the word "liberal" is a dirty word (as well as liberal ideology being not only wrong, but illegitimate), most self-described liberals are just as wishy-washy, middle-of-the-road and ineffective as yours are over there.

Re: Cheers

Re: Cheers

Yes, Hypocrisy is rampant. The compulsory medical insurance, the individual mandate, was on McCain's 2008 GOP platform and Obama opposed it. After originating in the conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, and after 20 years of advocacy by the GOP, when the Dems coopted the idea--why the GOP tried to have it ruled unconstitutional.

Mussolini equated fascism with corporatism, hardly a 'socialist' position by today's usage of the term. Both he and Hitler began their reigns of error by privatizing nationalized industries, selling them to their cronies. Fascism is closer to state managed crony capitalism than socialism and is itself neither 'Left' nor 'Right'. That's why both use it as a derogatory of the other.

Obama is a 'Third Way' Democratic Leadership Council politician, which is why so many moneyed interests backed him. He's a centrist with progressive rhetoric in contrast to the centrist with conservative rhetoric, Ronald Reagan Sr. The Right might hold fealty to Reagan, but if he ran for office today with his governing history, he'd be labeled a RINO and the Tea Party would oppose him. Reagan not only legalized abortion in California before Roe v. Wade, but he also balanced California's budget with what would today be a $17 billion tax increase. As President, Reagan not only signed the largest peacetime revenue generating tax increase in the nation's history, TEFRA, but also increased taxes for Medicare and Social Security.

Re: none of the above

"A lot could be solved by compulsory voting and a none of the above box."

I'd bet that, particularly with compulsory voting, "none of the above" would win in just about every country on Earth. It's a wonderful idea, but what happens next? You do actually have a post that needs filling. Someone has to decide on levels of taxation, public expenditure and foreign policy, because you cannot say "Stop the universe, we haven't got a winner yet!".

Re: Cheers

I even saw someone on these forums rant about fascists as a right-wing idealogy.

Perhaps it was someone who'd read a bit in political science. While many fascists disagree with the left/right dichotomy as a descriptive mechanism, scholars who do use it locate fascism on the far right.

Uh, Mussolini - pretty much responsible for the modern term, was a socialist. The NAZIs were the National Socialism party

Their use of the "socialism" label, and for that matter of ideas commonly associated with the left, doesn't prevent their movements from being far-right.

and when they gained power, economically turned into a kind of state managed industrialism (hardly capitalist).

Who says the extreme right has to be capitalist or liberal?

"Fascism" refers to a class of political organizations and ideologies that are corporatist, syndicalist, and totalitarian, with a powerful state controlled by repressive (police and military), economic, and ideological means. The last typically include a powerful national narrative, often linked to racial or ethnic purity. It's generally considered right-wing because it espouses a strong state made up of corporations or syndicates.

Extreme left-wing political ideologies, on the other hand, advocate dissolving the state or at least hierarchical authority - though in practice this never happens, and they tend to dictatorship and oligarchy.

They're not useful terms. They were back in the days of Pitt the Younger

They come from the French revolutionary-period Estates General, actually. True, that overlapped with the end of P-the-Y's days.

In centrist liberal politics, the sort espoused by both the major parties (and most significant minor ones) in the US, "leftist" ideologies are those that prioritize a more egalitarian state and advocate an activist government to produce it (and so put a lower priority on things like property rights), while "rightist" ideologies prioritize property rights and economic freedom (and so advocate a less-intrusive government). Note these are both liberal positions - they both seek to shore up civil rights; they're just coming at it from different directions. You can see it as a question of whether purported natural rights (eg the right to possess sufficient resources to secure a comfortable existence) outweigh purported immediate rights (eg the right to retain the profits of your labor).

That said, the major parties do have rather incoherent platforms, viewed solely on this left/right axis, as approximately a zillion commentators have noted over the years. But it remains a useful approximation precisely to the extent that people continue to use it, and so agree more or less on what it means in this context.

Re: Cheers

it strikes me that compared with a rest of the democratic world, the USA enjoys two right wing parties

The US political system has produced a much narrower spectrum of successful political parties than most other democracies, true. (Japan's is also pretty narrow.) That's partly because parliamentary systems reward limited success in a way that the US's first-past-the-post voting mechanisms do not; you can't be a minor partner in a coalition government in the US. (Well, there's some room for independents-caucusing-with-a-major-party in Congress, and at the state and local level there's a bit more variation. But on the whole government in the US tends to severely penalize minor players.)

Re: Liberals!

Even though conservatives over here in America think the word "liberal" is a dirty word (as well as liberal ideology being not only wrong, but illegitimate), most self-described liberals are just as wishy-washy, middle-of-the-road and ineffective as yours are over there.

And then there are those of us who've bothered to study a bit of political science, and know that the word "liberal" describes pretty much everyone in US politics.

And while they're all "middle-of-the-road" from a broader political perspective, most of them are ineffective, and many are wishy-washy, for the most part they're hampered by the simple fact that complicated problems rarely have simple solutions. Though there are plenty of simple-minded folk who think otherwise.

Re: A Bargain!

Re: A Bargain!

I remember my wife paying for a hotmail address with 2 or 4GB storage (or however much; more storage was then already free with gmail), so having them on his "bad" list proves that paying money doesn't sufficiently guarantee me the money goes to sufficiently extremist pockets.

Re: A Bargain!

For some people, EVERYTHING'S about them

It takes a real political zealot to frame everyday things like webmail as a battle of GOOD versus EEEEVIL. Most of us just use it to email things. Most of us don't care too much if the web mail providers leans Democrat or Republican. Mostly importantly, most of us don't live in the US.

Re: For some people, EVERYTHING'S about them

Well not really. There are many people who base many decisions on the political contributions and endorsements of the manufacturers of the goods they buy, the actors in the movies they watch, the talk shows that a given advertiser buys time on, and so on, ad nauseum.

I can't see anything wrong with not wanting to contribute to the income of a service that uses part of the income their users generate, to support causes that the users are against.

So what?

"So far, Google employees have raised more than $263,000 for Barack Obama's 2012 reelection campaign, Reagan says, and Microsoft employees have chipped in another $363,000."

Unless he is claiming that S. Ballmer and L. Page accompanied by their respective boards personally go round Redmond or Mountain View shaking collection tins under their employee's noses murmuring "nice job you've got there, shame if you lost it" then work-place collections (for whatever reason) are scarcely new or unprecedented. What he in reality appears to be complaining about is that a certain proportion of individual Americans donate to a political party he does not like. Funny how those who shout loudest about patriotism in US politics refuse to recognise those rights and freedoms that they boast about when they are exercised by fellow US citizens whose politics the barking wing of the Fox News Party don't like.

"the barking wing of the Fox News Party"

Re: So what?

I also think its valid to know whether a company uses its profits to lobby/support political campaigns/candidates.

But knowing how a PRIVATE individual chooses to spend their income? None of anyone's business. Or doesn't the idiot know the difference between individuals and the companies they work for?

If so, he doesn't seem to know much about "individual rights" the Repubs are supposedly so big on. Or is everyone supposed to follow the Chick-Fil-A model, and just funnel company profits in the right directions.

Re: So what?

Re: "the barking wing of the Fox News Party"

Re: So what?

Nailed It!

The only conclusion that can be drawn at all from those statements is that INDIVIDUALS as opposed to the anonymous "super" PAC's are donating more money to Obama than Romney on those specific sites and from those select companies.

What's disgusting here to me is American news Media today, the golden age of professional Journalism is long gone in this country with the age of cable... Am I the only one who sees the irony in Fox New's claim of "Fair and Balanced" News coverage? You have Fox News on one extreme and MSNBC with the Ed and Rachel Maddox Shows at the other and all the others fall somewhere in-between and just blindly playing the sound-bytes with no apparent care about the actual validity of the comments made in them. Every year it gets harder to cut though it all to get to the truth of what's actually going on. Used to be the news would verify information and report it factually, it was a matter of integrity and professionalism over ratings. Sadly today that's too boring when you have 900 channels to choose from.

Mine's the one with the CSPAN program guide in the pocket, If I'm going to get fed manure on TV it'll get it straight from the source and make up my own mind.

More likely ...

The left-leaning side of society is more "modern" than the right.

Case in point ... Of my Wife's side of the family (231 people in all), all the folks who are registered Democrat (a hair over 100) happily use my email server for family messaging. Only five of the 100ish registered Republicans use email AT ALL, and only two of them use my server. The other three use AOL.

The rest? The rest are greens and various other frothing independents. They all used my system, until I banned every last one of 'em for abuse of resources ...